


Fallen

by candidjelly



Series: Irondad and Spiderson [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Trailer, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Tony Stark, Irondad, Irondad & Spiderson, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Steve is being a bit of a dick in this one, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, sorry bout that, spiderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 13:33:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18262337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candidjelly/pseuds/candidjelly
Summary: “We were all mourning, Tony,” Clint finally spoke up, slumped in a corner of the room where the light didn’t quite reach. His voice was scratchy and low, but in no way weak. “We still are.”The room went deathly silent, save for the pattering of raindrops on the windows. They never directly referred to the fallen.“Yeah well, I wouldn’t expecthimto understand that,” Steve spat out bitterly, his dark gaze unwavering on Tony.They had all lost something irreplaceable after the Snap. Just because Tony Stark wouldn't admit exactly what it was he had lost, didn't mean it made him any less broken.





	Fallen

It was grey. Grey and cold and dead as it always was, had been, and would be until they fixed this. **  
**

The world had gone monochrome, no one ever being able to see the light, the joy, the colour they once had now that half of it had slipped away. Since that day, since the Fading, as mass news outlets had become accustomed to calling it. But them? The so-called Avengers who had tasked themselves with the prevention of this exact scenario, and had failed? They only ever referred to it as the Snap.

The snap of Thanos’s fingers, obviously, but also just…  _snap_  everything changed.  _Snap_. The battle lost, just like that,  _snap_. People once there,  _snap_ , gone.  _Snap._

They were gathered - some sat, some standing, some pacing restlessly - around the table, sighing and yelling at each other about matters out of their hands. They circled round and round endless impossibilities, over how they could ever hope to avenge the fallen. There was never an answer, never a plan. Each day that they failed to come up with something,  _anything_ , was just another gruelling defeat. Tony didn’t think he could take any more of this desperate hopelessness that had pervaded since that day.

How long had it even been?

“But we can’t rely on that, Bruce. It’s not -”

A month? Nearly two?

“It could be the only chance we have of -”

Had he slept at all this week? He dragged a hand down his face, unruly stubble scratching at his palm. Likely not.

“Well if Tony could pull it together and -”

He glanced down at his hand. A few of his own eyelashes lay on his fingertips for a brief moment, before the constant tremble of his hands made them fall, fluttering out of sight.

“Tony, for God’s sake!”

Tony inhaled suddenly, shallowly through his nose. Cap’s eyes were red and wide, fixed on him. A hot, unbridled rage pulsated from his very being and Nat rested her hand firmly on the Captain’s forearm. A half-assed attempt at preventing the inevitable.

“Why do you even call these meetings when you’ve got jackshit to say!”

“Language,” Bruce muttered. It was a stupid attempt at keeping the animosity in the group at bay, to remind them of the good times, the friendly teasing that used to come so easily to them all. It didn’t work; Steve’s eyes were fixed almost manically on Tony and he raised a hand to point directly at him.

“You’re keeping this from working. You’re wasting our time while we could be actually working on a practical way to get our friends back, instead of sitting here under your careful watch, trying to explain ourselves to you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tony tilted his head with sass almost as if those words hadn’t just made the perpetual black hole in his chest even bigger. “And how exactly are you gonna come up with a plan when you’re all in separate parts of the country without contact with one another?” Tony looked around at the group, accusatory tone rumbling in his empty chest, “I'm the only reason you’re all still talking to each other. You think I’ve forgotten what you sobs were up to while I was still floating around space? You were all off in your own worlds, running around aimlessly like headless chickens, doing exactly what you’re accusing me of: jack-fucking-shit.”

“I beg to differ,” Scott piped up, but hardly offered anything else in his defence. It was clear to anyone witness that he hadn’t yet found his place in the group.

Bruce at least put the effort in. “Rhodes and I were working tirelessly on Fury’s pager -”

“Oh sure, keeping a pager on charge and watching it blink at you must’ve been really emotionally taxing,” Tony drawled, with the slightest twinge of regret. He didn’t mean to snap at the scientist, who he could usually rely on in these times of opposition, but he was exhausted and so fucking sick of these meetings. But he had to call them, to gauge whether anyone had got anywhere with a plan, even though it was always a dead-end. Still, the blind hope willed him to keep calling them in. They had to hit on something one of these days, right?

“It got me here,” Carol spoke up, posture tall and strong and Tony wished he had half as much confidence as she emitted almost every second of her existence.

“And what more have you done for this than anyone else in this room has?” Tony challenged, knowing full-well they were all equally useless at the moment and knowing that this wasn’t exactly a foreign concept to anyone else here. Carol simply looked away, fiery gaze fixed on the window looking out upon the landscape surrounding the compound, now glistening with rain. Thor glared at him, but he had nothing to offer either.

“We were all mourning, Tony,” Clint finally spoke up, slumped in a corner of the room where the light didn’t quite reach. His voice was scratchy and low, but in no way weak. “We still are.”

The room went deathly silent, save for the pattering of raindrops on the windows. They never directly referred to the fallen.

“Yeah well, I wouldn’t expect  _him_  to understand that,” Steve spat out bitterly, his dark gaze unwavering on Tony.

And Christ did that knock the breath out of him.

“I - Excuse me?” Tony barely gasped out, his chest tight and aching.

“Go ahead, try to defend yourself. We’ve all lost people before, Tony, including you. But not this time,” his jaw twinged and the table could be heard faintly groaning from where he clenched his hand around the edge of it. “You had years to deal with your grief for your parents, but this is fresh for the rest of us. This is so much more than you could comprehend.”

There was a universal unease around the room, shoulders tensed, breath stunted. But no intervention was made. No argument, no defence. Tony was alone.

_“Mr. Stark? I don’t feel so good…”_

God, no. Don’t think about it. He swallowed, sharp pain radiating through his neck as he fought past the hard lump in his throat to speak, “You don’t think I feel it everyday? Don’t notice how everyone, everything has changed? Half the world, half the fucking universe -”

“We know the facts, Tony!” Steve exploded, face red and spittle flying from his mouth. “That’s all you care about, the damn facts, the figures. You can’t understand just how much deeper it goes because you lost no one this time around!”

Tony scoffed, his eyes burning.

_“I don’t - I don’t know what’s happening.”_

He fell back into his chair and stared at the furious superhuman across from him. How could that bastard be so unaware?

“That’s enough, Cap,” Rhodey butted in dangerously - too late. Tony had forgotten he was even here.

“No, not this time. I’m not gonna sit back and let metalhead over here ruin everything for us because of his super-ego. We know you’re a genius, we know you wanna fix this and you blame yourself and all that shit, but at the end of the day, Tony, you can’t care about this as much as we all do. You came out of the Snap with everything still intact. You’ve got your fiancée, your best friend,” Steve indicated Rhodey, “you even got to keep your fucking chauffeur to drive you around to find all of us and make us feel like we’re the ones doing something wrong.”

_“I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go.”_

“Steve, you can stop anytime now,” Nat called out to him reluctantly.

He battled on regardless: “We’re not gonna take it anymore. We feel guilty enough without you breathing down our necks. We lost everything that day! You came back to everything you had before. You even scored fewer people to have to boss around,” he added almost hysterically, to the shock of everyone around the room. How could he be so senseless? “We lost, Tony. You won.”

“Stop!” Tony screamed, raising from his chair. His heart was beating double-time and he had to bite his tongue harshly to stop from crying out from the pain radiating from the arc reactor. It seemed all he ever felt nowadays was heartache. He tasted iron.

“How fucking dare you,” Tony whispered, fully aware of how his voice rattled and caught with the sheer emotion behind it. “I won? I - You’re so conceited you don’t -”

“Oh, now I’m the conceited -”

“Let me fucking finish!” The sentence was wrenched directly from his lungs, and for a while after it felt like the whole earth quaked with the memories and emotions that flooded him.

_“Sir, please! Please, I don’t wanna go!”_

Tony forced himself to keep going: “I lost.”

The whole room waited with bated breath, eyes boring into Tony’s with morbid curiosity.

“I lost just as much as anyone here, I lost part of my family.”

“Everyone did, Tony,” Scott inserted, quieting down when Tony fixed a glare on him.

“I know! I’m not saying I’m special, I’m reminding you all that none of us are.” He at least thanked the adrenaline coursing through his veins that he could get a somewhat comprehensible argument out of him while his chest felt like it could just about implode. “None of us are alone in this suffering. We’re all in the same boat, we just gotta push through it and hope we can fix it, ok? None of us deserve to be moping around anymore.” He fixed his eyes on Steve.

Steve scoffed and turned away, starting towards the door. Natasha followed quickly behind him.

For a moment Tony thought of stopping them. A moment, and then he just let it go. They wouldn’t go far; what the team had in terms of knowledge and action plans (if anything) lay here in the compound and that’s where it would stay until the day they reversed all of this. Until then the team would stick around, no matter how many of these arguments they found themselves in.

Carol and Thor both took their leave as well, though it was clear that they weren’t doing so out of spite towards Tony, but rather more they didn’t see the point in staying any longer.

“Tony,” Rhodey had started to murmur to him, low enough to be considerate, but not low enough to avoid the attention of all who had stayed. “I know you -”

“Meeting adjourned,” Tony quickly announced, standing tall and staring pointedly at the remaining people until they had all bustled out of the room. Rhodey remained.

“Why won’t you tell them?” he asked gently. They both knew what - who - he was referring to.

Tony avoided his eyes. “They know he… went.”

“They know Tony Stark’s intern Spider-Man died.” Tony’s breath halted. He avoided using the ‘D’ word with regards to those lost in the Snap. They weren’t dead, not truly. They couldn’t be. “They don’t know Peter. They don’t know what he was to you.”

Tony didn’t react to him. Not verbally, at least. His vision was blurred over, eyes burning fiercely as he squinted them shut and bent forwards slightly to hide how his chest rose and fell so quickly. The room was quiet and still, until there was a friendly pat on his shoulder, footsteps, a door closing, and then Tony was left to himself.

He collapsed to the ground instantly, finally gasping in a wet breath as hot tears coursed down his cheeks.

He hadn’t told the others what Peter was to him, of course he hadn’t. He’d never told anyone at all. Not even Peter. And that was why no one could know yet. He couldn’t bear to tell anyone just how much he cared for that kid because what did it matter if the kid could never hear it himself?

Tony’s whole body trembled, and his head tingled and felt as if it was floating off his body. He forced himself to control his breathing. In, out. In. Out. In, hold. Out…

_“I don’t wanna go. I’m sorry…”_

A sob wracked through his body, shaking his very soul.

Tony Stark had lost a son that day. And no one would know that until his son was back in his arms.

**Author's Note:**

> This was far more angsty than anything I have ever written (or ever will again, probably) but this idea was just too adamant to let go...
> 
> Stop by my tumblr: [gayspiderbaby](https://gayspiderbaby.tumblr.com/)


End file.
